Pokémon Blue Catch ‘em All F.A.Q.

Pokémon Blue Catch ‘em All F.A.Q.

Q: What are you trying to do?
A: I am trying to catch all 151 Pokémon in Pokémon Blue as fast as possible

Q: What is your best time?
A: My best time is 1:37:12

Q: What is the World Record?
A: The World Record time is 1:37:12

Q: That's you!
A: I know!

Q: What are you playing this on?
A: I am playing this on a GameCube with a Gameboy player attachment.  I use a Gameboy Advance SP as my controller

Q: Where can you save time?
A: A lot of places! The route is fairly new, and no one (including me) has really gotten super comfortable with the menus yet

Q: What Pokémon do you use in the run?
A: I choose Bulbasaur as my starter, I use a Pidgey for Fly, and I use an Ekans as my main Pokémon as the run goes on

Q: Do you have to use Bulbasaur? Isn’t Squirtle used in the Glitchless run?
A: Yes, Squirtle is used in Glitchless, however Bulbasaur is faster for any Glitched run that uses “Brock Through Walls”. This is because Bulbasaur has the highest Special stat of any early game Pokémon

Q: Why aren’t you just starting your timer at New Game like a normal person?
A: We need to use RNG Manipulation to get a specific Trainer ID

Q: What’s RNG Manipulation?
A: Basically, when you hard reset your game, you’ll be at the same RNG “seed” every time. If you can somehow perform the same inputs on the same frames after a hard reset, you’ll get the same results each time. Luckily, many inputs in the intro and overworld are bufferable, meaning you have a window (usually about a half a second) to perform your input for it to count on the same frame. We can use this to get a specific Trainer ID, encounter specific Pokémon on specific tiles with specific stats, etc

Q: Why did you name your Rival AaRRSA*
A: During the Item Underflow section (explained below), one of the things we have access to is the Rival name. By naming our Rival something very specific, we can give ourselves specific items that will be useful to us throughout the run

Q: What glitches do you use to catch Pokémon?
A: LG (LOL Glitch), Trainer Fly, Brock Fly, Text Pointer Manipulation, and Crazy Warp

Q: Can you explain each glitch used in the run?
A: No. But here’s an attempt at all I can think of off the top of my head (if you want further explanation, feel free to ask in chat):

Brock Through Walls - The first glitch we use. The basic gist of it is that we want to talk to the Brock Skip guy from the right. If we do that normally, we lock up our game as the game doesn’t know what to do; our coordinates aren’t in the script table to determine how to walk. By setting up specific values in memory to match these coordinates (16 Special on Bulbasaur, and a Pidgey [Index 36]), we can trick the game into starting the event where the guy walks us to the Gym while we still have access to use the D-Pad. During this event, collision detection is disabled which allows us to walk through walls until we enter a warp (door) or actually follow the guy to the Gym

Trainer Fly - Although we actually perform zero Trainer Flies in this run, I’ll explain what they are. Also known as the Mew Glitch. To perform this, we escape the sight of a trainer before the battle initiates which puts us in a weird state. If we then return to the area with the trainer after ending another trainer battle, we will encounter a Pokémon based on the Special value of the last Pokémon we fought

Death Fly - Trainer Fly variant where instead of escaping a trainer using Fly or Dig, we get an encounter directly in front of the trainer and white out to it. We do this using RNG Manipulation to allow us to bypass buying Abra in Celadon while trying to get Underflow

Missingno - Everyone’s seen this one. We encounter two Missingno, each time increasing the quantity of the item in the sixth slot of our inventory by 128. Doing this twice (and tossing two), we can get to a quantity of 255 which allows us to do…

Item Underflow - Biggest glitch we utilize. Item Underflow, which can be attained by tricking the game into thinking we have -1 or less items, allows us to access many more items in our bag than the normal 20. These items just correspond to the next 200+ slots of memory, which means we have a glorified hex editor. Using this, we can do things like Warp from location to location, change our Trainer ID, and distort the map

PC Underflow - Same concept as Item Underflow, except we do this in our Item PC. This allows us to access different memory addresses, including the number of coins we have, and the various map scripts (which allows us to set up Trainer Flies without actually entering the area)

JACK - The item will say “CANCEL”, but we’re going to refer to it a lot as JACK. JACK is a glitch item that, when used, will allow us to walk through walls. Essentially, the game will freeze your character facing in a particular direction, and perform all collision detection based on the direction he is facing rather than the direction he is moving. If we face up, and move down, for example, we can walk onto and through a wall or other obstacle

Warping - One of the things we have access to in Item Underflow is the value of the last map we were at. The game uses this to determine where to warp the player to when he exits a door. We can change this to any value we want, allowing us to warp to any map we want

Connection Warping - Very similar to the above, except instead of warping when we exit a door, we warp when we hit the map edge. For example, if we change the “North” connection to be Map 83 (used in the Celadon Dept Store), we would warp to Power Plant when we exit the Northern side of the map

Text Pointer Manipulation - One of the things we have access to in Item Underflow is the Text Pointers for a given map. By modifying this to a specific value, we can force different triggers (signs, Nurse Joy, item balls, etc) to give us Pokémon

Item Mutation - One of the things we have access to in Item Underflow is the X Coordinate that the player is at. By swapping an item into this slot and moving left or right, we are able to change what that item is

Brock Fly - Very similar to Brock Through Walls. This time, we create our coordinates in memory by using Full Restore (Index 16) x36. We then have another item after it in our inventory (Fire Stone x99 and CANCEL x95), which will both allow us to to walk through walls, but also sets up certain values in memory which will trigger specific Pokémon for Trainer Fly

Safari Zone with normal encounters - Not sure how it works, but I know it has to do with the fact that we change the Map ID for the current map before getting the encounters, so the game probably thinks we’re not in Safari but we really are

LOL Glitch - Not really sure all of the details, but the basic gist is that we are able to use map tiles to mutate an encounter into any other Pokémon. To do this, we use 9F in a battle to allow us to move around the overworld while still in a battle state. We then move to a specific tile (or distort the map, or both), flash a TMTRAINER item to mutate the Pokémon, and then throw a Master Ball. One of the negative side effects of this is that the next encounter we get will be corrupted, so we often have to reset immediately after to return our game to a normal state. Gift Pokémon will also return our game to a (mostly) normal state (using 9F too many times without resetting can blow the stack), which you may see more of in the near future with a potential route improvement

Crazy Warp - By changing the Map ID while in a battle, we’ll end up on a different map when the battle ends. For some reason I don’t know, when we do that, some item balls will turn into triggers to start an encounter with Pokémon that correspond to the index of the item the ball was for. This is used to catch a number of Pokémon, including Gengar, Magneton and Vulpix

Q: Can you do this run on Pokémon Red?
A: Technically, yes, however the route I am following is very specific to Blue

Q: What’s your goal time?
A: A good one